When Jon Myers and partner Chuck Hootman created their first iPhone app, “Cornhole All-Stars,” their aim was to come up with a fun, casual game that would give them a foothold for their new game start-up JUFTi. The last thing they expected was to run into censorship troubles, which they did — in Canada.
(http://online.wsj.com/media/cornholecensored_D_20091009174449.jpg)
Canada’s censoring of Jufti’s
Cornhole All-Stars is turning
into a marketing opportunity
for the app.
Cornhole, also known as Bags or Baggo, is a popular game in some circles where players toss a bag –- traditionally filled with corn kernels –- into a round hole on a slanted board about 30 feet away. Myers’s iPhone app is a virtual version of the game, featuring cute animated characters in various settings.
Though the app was published on Apple’s App Store worldwide on August 1, the Canadian App Store would only list it as “C******e All-Stars.” That made it difficult for anyone to search for the game among the 85,000 apps in the store. “Everybody was disappointed,” said Myers in a phone interview.
The Columbus, Ohio-based developer said Apple declined to comment on the decision to obscure the game’s title. A request for information from the Canadian prime minister and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which administers broadcast standards in the country, also got no response.
Apple officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Myers said he believes the censorship has something to do with the prohibition against the use of certain words by the Canadian council because cornhole is also slang for a certain sex act.
The $1 game has nevertheless been “mildly successful,” said Myers, garnering 20,000 downloads and getting on the top 100 list for games.
Myers, who said Canadian sales are poor, is now planning to use the censorship issue as a marketing opportunity. We want to “use this as an opportunity to talk about transparency for developers in the App Store,” he said, adding that he will be traveling to Toronto on Thursday “to have fun with it and embark upon a non-traditional way to market our game.”